4 hour sprints
Markus' Consistency is key, but what is a crowbar? prescribes the following formula. Dedicate 3-4 hours once in a blue moon to speedrunning something on the back burner in a streamlined environment with no context switching. Even if you fail, you spent a couple of hours working on something you wanted to do anyway.
What personal examples come to mind?
- Designing Agave, the CSS theme I use for this blog.
- One of my friends practicing a hard-to-learn video game technique to mastery.
- Another one of my friends teaching themselves graphic design, video editing, and other skills in separate stints.
Perhaps those examples are too vague or not compelling enough for you. Markus mentioning "trying to learn juggling" as a possibility reminded me of Sean's LessWrong essay for Inkhaven, Most people can't juggle one ball. He summarizes it as:
TLDR: A complete guide to juggling, from zero to siteswap notation, by someone who juggles in nightclubs.
If both of your hands are still intact, I'd wager that 3-4 hours of practice could get you anywhere between inconsistently juggling 1 ball to consistently juggling 3 or more. I say this as people differ in what juggling criteria they intuitively understand, partially get, or must learn from scratch. Instead of attaching yourself to an outcome, revel in the progress that you make. Even assuming the starting position with 0 balls sets you apart from those who have never done so. That can resemble the same marked difference as stepping foot into the gym compared to never having visited it. It's one fruitful decision that can cascade into so many more.
I'm glad Markus chose juggling as one of his examples since I have supplemental material on it. Perhaps his reason was how disproportionate and mystical the activity can appear to be. Just read thom's reply to this Hacker News submission, Library of Juggling:
Juggling is one of hobbies with the highest ratios of being able to impress random people versus the actual effort you have to put in, and I generally find I never forget 3-ball stuff I learned as a kid. It's also as good as a long walk for getting you out of your head when needed.
Donald's Substack note resembles a more poetic reaction to juggling:
Jugglers seem closer to god than other creatures of the carnival
With those accounts in mind, how much progress could you make with it in 3-4 hours of dedicated practice? Installing that foundation can make applying consistency afterward that much easier. If you end up not wanting to stick with it, at least you tried something new and narrowed down your interests at that.
Although, could you iterate Markus' suggestion at a quicker cadence? For example, Visa's tweet translates Markus' 4 hour window to his maximum daily productivity allowance:
Realistically, I can only ever be truly productive for 4 hours a day. Most days, I'm lucky to even have 2 truly good, productive hours, where I'm really moving the needle. And I get by with the output of those 2 hours!
I wish somebody told me this when I was like... 10
Kpaxs' quote tweet returns to a more general frame which, in my eyes, also serves as a nice endpiece and call to action:
You have four hours what are you doing with them?